Wu Wei

In practicing my T’ai Chi Chih one day, I started to think about the Taoist concept of wu-wei(無爲). Wu is something akin to “without” and wei translates into something like “action” or in this case “struggle.” It means to act without acting or without struggling, which is much easier said than done. I remember when I first started studying TCC. It seemed so much easier than the T’ai Chi Chu’an, which I’d learned some 20 years earlier. The TCC brochure said that there were only 19 movements and 1 posture, substantially less than the 108 moves contained in the ancient form I’d learned so long ago. “I can do this in no time,” I thought. I was right at one level. In six weeks, with the help of instructor Bill Moore, I’d gotten all of the moves down. Or so I thought. “That wasn’t too bad,” I remember thinking. And then the fun began. Since then I’ve spent countless hours trying to perfect what I’ve learned. And the key word here is trying. I was trying so hard and was so attached to the results that I was missing an important part of TCC: the practice.

This brings me back to wu-wei. I don’t remember when I first realized I should practice the TCC movements without worrying about results (or worrying about them too much). “Just Do It” as Nike, the Winged Goddess of Victory, so eloquently commands. Just do the moves without any attachment to the results. Just do them without any thought of whether it’s a “good” practice or a “bad” practice. Just do them without thinking about how much Chi is circulating in the bubbling springs of your feet. Just do them with softness and continuity, with effort-less effort. Be natural, like a river, and flow. There’s no “doing” when it comes to a river flowing. It just does what it does, without judgment of any kind. The less we contend, the more we achieve. And the more we align ourselves with the Eternal Tao, the better off we’ll be since, as the Tao Te Ching (verse 37) says, “The Tao never strives, yet nothing is left undone.”